This invention relates to a facsimile telecommunication system and method and in particular to a combined fax broadcast, store and broadcast, fax-on-demand and voicemail system.
A noticeable trend for information service providers is a move away from producing large general information content and towards tailoring the content for a specific group of subscribers or a single subscriber. One area already benefiting from such content is that of electronic mail in which specific electronic content can be sent to very large numbers of users under automatic program control. More established technologies such as facsimile have been slow to develop tailored services mainly due to the resources and generally higher amount of manual interaction needed. For example, one facsimile machine taking two minutes to transmit a document could only service thirty subscribers an hour. To service a thousand clients within one quarter of an hour, as is needed for some financial information, over a hundred facsimile machines would be required, each machine needing a large amount of manual interaction. When a large number of different documents are available this problem is compounded.
Some facsimile broadcast solutions have gone some way to ease this problem. For example a fax broadcast solution using IBM""s DirectTalk/2(trademark) voice system comprises a personal computer having telephone network adapters and hardware for simulating a plurality of fax machines. Such a solution can allow forty eight subscribers to receive simultaneous transmission of dockets. However a single platform does not cater to bulk broadcasting services which can require over a hundred facsimile broadcasts simultaneously. At the present time the processing power of personal computers limits the number of fax card adapters that may be used on a single computer.
An additional problem with fax broadcast is that it relies upon the service provider for the information. This may be addressed by a store and broadcast function in which the facsimile machine is configured to receive and store a facsimile from a third party (a privileged subscriber) and then broadcast it to a list of subscribers. One example of store and broadcast is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,459,584 which discloses a store and forward system associated with a plurality of subscriber fax machines. However it is a store and broadcast system only and does not address bulk broadcast.
With broadcast only solutions, the subscriber is reliant on the service provider or the privileged subscriber to include in the broadcast the information he requires. The information needs of the subscriber may be changing and additional or alternative information may be required. It would be useful if the subscriber could dial into the service provide and request a particular document to be sent to him Such a system is U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,634 which discloses a method for transmitting specifically requested graphic and/or textual data from an unattended database storage location to a requester""s facsimile machine over a telephone line. It includes a host computer with a facsimile transmission board and a voice generation board. Multiple workstation nodes can be configured in a network setup to handle a high volume of calls in real time and to allow multiple data services to operate simultaneously. However this is a fax-on-demand system only and does not address broadcasting.
Another publication U.S. Pat. No. 5,068,888 discloses an information delivery system which automatically delivers documents from a central information storage location to a facsimile machine positioned at a remote location in response to user requests that are automatically answered by the system, The information delivery system includes an extended memory for digitally storing image files of documents. This publication there is no mention of bulk broadcast of fax documents.
Information service providers may also provide one way voice information services such as weather lines or cinema programs. More interactive services such as xe2x80x98for salexe2x80x99 voicemail boxes and personal voicemail boxes allow a subscriber to leave a voicemail message and for subsequent callers to listen and leave response messages for the subscriber.
One problem an information service provider faces if he wants to provide both fax bulk broadcast and voice services is that known systems are dedicated an separate requiring their own hardware and telephone lines. Integration of both facsimile and voice services would be useful as hardware resources and telephone lines could be shared. In addition to cost savings such an integration would be practical in terms of the telephone line usage efficiency. In the example of newspaper information providers facsimile usage is particularly heavy in the early morning when voicemail activity is low, such sharing of resources is therefore complementary.
It is an object of the present embodiment to provide a bulk fax broadcasting system that can also provide fax-on-demand, fax-store and forward and voice mail facilities.
One aspect of the invention is provided by claim 1.
This system provides a combined fax broadcast and fax-on-demand system not available in the prior art and provides an increased efficient use of external phone lines by configuration of the functions performed on the phone lines.
Preferably the main storage means is provided by a central computer attached to a network and each fax means is provided by a server computer attached to the network.
Each fax means is advantageously connected to local storage means for storing documents and fax information for transmission by or received from the fax means and means for copying a document and associated information from the central storage means to a local storage means are provided. In this way the risk of losing or corrupting data is reduced by eliminating the need to send document data over a remote connection in real time for immediate fax transmission.
In the preferred embodiment, the system may receive a fax document from an external subscriber on an incoming line and store it on its local data storage. The document may then be copied to the main data storage for use in fax broadcast or fax-on-demand. Such a feature allows greater choice of available documents so that subscribers are not limited to documents provided.
In the preferred embodiment, the system may initiate broadcast of a demanded document on the same channel as a received call. Such a feature is useful when a subscriber has a single telephone line with a combined fax and telephone. Such a broadcast will also save the information provider the cost of the phone call and mean lower prices for the subscriber.
In the preferred embodiment, the number of channels configured as broadcast channels is a function of the number of documents scheduled for broadcast. This allows the system to advantageously reconfigure itself to achieve the maximum use of the telephone lines.
A further aspect of the invention is provided by a fax broadcast and fax-on-demand system as claimed in claim 11.
A further aspect of the invention is provided by a method of ensuring communication integrity within a client server system as claimed in claim 10.